Disclaimer: don't own Doctor Who or any sense of patience. Lyric lines are Fast Car by Tracy Chapman.

Note: It is 4am and this is my friend's fault. Anyway this will probably be shown to be ridiculous by canon in a couple of weeks but he told me to post it and I'm easily influenced and sort of really like Rory. So enjoy.

x

Doctors and Nurses

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The dawn is slow and ordinary. The sun comes up, ray by ray, as it did long before he was ever here and long after it will when he goes.

Life is far more fleeting than he thought.

He counts every single heartbeat in his chest. Fifty in a minute. He doesn't know if that's good or bad or not really anything special at all.

Since it's his heart he's on about, he doubts it's doing anything spectacular.

She had gone with her Raggedy Doctor in the end. He had always known she would, really, because you can see that sort of thing in someone's eyes, when they have found the thing they want to do for the rest of their lives. And Amy, what she had wanted to do more than anything else was bring back that brilliance that had once upon a time brushed against the edges of her life.

She had been seven years old when he came first. Rory remembers it because he was out of town at the time, and when he came back she had gotten so, so quiet. He heard later from her aunt that she'd been talking non-stop and non-stop about this strange man who promised and he said five minutes, but Rory didn't really know what that was about. All Rory knew, back then, was that Amelia from the next street, with the impossibly red hair and lilt of Scotland clinging to her like the smell of exotic spice, had gotten quiet, and that he didn't like it.

He knew it even then, if he's honest. Oh, he couldn't put it into words, nothing as tangible as that. No. This was...this was that sort of feeling you get in dreams, when you know something for certain and you don't know how you know it and maybe it contradicts everything your eyes are telling you but you know it. And Rory knew, then, at nine years old, that Amelia Pond would follow the Raggedy Doctor anywhere he wanted to go.

Amelia grew up and shed childhood like a skin that had gotten too tight. Rory grew alongside her, but he grew differently – gangly, like being awkwardly stretched, filling out wrong and stumbling from place to place like he had his head stuck in one of their games from childhood. Amy, she at least had something, she had her fire – and, when she thought no one important was listening, she still had her accent.

He doesn't know when he fell in love with her. Somewhere along the way, perhaps, or maybe right at the beginning, or maybe it was just a decision he made when he woke up one morning and there he was, the Raggedy Doctor, in the flesh. Real as daylight and, if what Amy said was anything to go by (and of course, it was, because Rory would go by whatever Amy said for all of his life), hadn't aged a day.

And when he saved her, saved Amy, in the hospital – where Rory worked, where he should have been able to protect her – he had seen how she had looked at him. And he had seen how he looked at her. Amy, she'd had twelve years by then to think of this bloke – this Doctor, whoever the hell he was, had known her maybe an hour or two. And for half that time, she'd been eight.

And he had looked at her like all he wanted to do was give her everything she wanted. Rory knows that look all too well – it's the one he can feel plastering itself all over his stupid face every time he sees her.

The only difference is the Doctor can actually do it.

He was magnificent. He was insane and uncontrollable and really not of this world at all, but he was magnificent. Even Rory saw it. But Amy...she'd had this with her all her life. This memory, this brilliance, hanging at the back of her thoughts, lingering in the shadows, whispering quietly 'there will always be better. There will always be me.'

No matter how many games of dress-up they played Rory would never be the Raggedy Doctor.

And really, if he is brutally honest, on nights like these with the dawn rising slowly over the little village he was born in and, one day, is going to die in, that is all he has ever wanted to be.

-

and i remember when we were drivingdriving in your carspeed so fast felt like i was drunkcity lights spread out before usand your arm felt nice wrapped round my shoulderand i had a feeling that i belongedi had a feeling i could be someone

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